


That Green Light

by RPGCATZ



Series: The Beer [1]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bipolar Disorder, Brian and Tim are mentioned but they really don’t make an appearance, Childhood, Everyone Has Issues, Haircuts, Hypersexuality, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-04-20 13:28:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14261997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RPGCATZ/pseuds/RPGCATZ
Summary: Snippets of Alex and Jay as time goes on.





	1. Normal

**Author's Note:**

> Edit(4/9/18): name change from “Your Love is Scaring Me” to “That Green Light”
> 
> Wrote this first chapter in one night and I’m not exactly happy with it but I needed to get this out or I would explode.  
> So yeah •v•

The first time he realizes he doesn’t feel okay, is when he is five, approaching six, and still goes by the name Mary.

 _ ~~She~~_ ~~~~He runs a hand down _ ~~her~~_ His side and feels the curve of _~~her~~_ His hip and the almost sharp stab of the bone under the flesh. 

An inhale.

A look at the boy with the red hair and glasses and freckles and sometimes bruises on his exposed skin that sits next to ~~_her_~~ Him when they just so happen to be put together for class or during time out on the playground. 

The boy, Alexander, long for Alex, Alex for short, looks back at him and gives a small smile. His lip cracked and a small bruise on his neck with a bunch of red dots near the center. His hair messy and wild, the usual for boys around their age. 

They would quietly talk behind the teachers when they weren’t looking, and would often draw in the dirt together while the sun glared down onto their small, hunched backs.

The boy, Alex, would shake sometimes. His eyes would fill with tears and his breathing would be quick and fast. 

He would be really happy and wild some days, and on others he would be quiet and snappy, a glare scratched into his facial features. 

He rarely sat still, a foot tapping, a finger drumming, a pencil turning, nails being bitten off of delicate, freckled fingers. 

 ~~ _Mary_~~ Jay reached a hand down and pulled Alex’s into ~~_her_~~ His own. 

“You okay?” 

A quick look to the teachers. 

A look back at Alex, at their hands, and another deep breath.

”I’m not a girl, it doesn’t feel right.”

For a moment, Alex was quite. 

Somewhere, a child kicked a ball and screamed and somewhere else, a group ran and played tag or something, and a teacher yelled a warning to be careful to a child on the swing set. Bugs buzzed around them. The sun glared on while the wind russled the leafs of trees and the loose hanging outfits of the playing children. 

But they were silent, staring at one another. 

His eyebrows were raised a bit in what looked like confusion or shock, maybe both, before they lowered on his brow. 

He looked down to their hands, then looked back up at ~~_Mary_~~ Jay. 

“Okay. Do you want me to stop calling you Mary?”

A nod. 

“What do you wanna be called then?” 

Mary looked out to the playground, her hand being held by Alex, and the sun glaring down at her exposed shoulders, which the straps of her yellow sundress refused to stay on straight. A bird chirped somewhere, and Mary was reminded of the nickname her father had given her. 

Jaybird. 

 _Jaybird_. 

The bird tweeted and flew off, it’s wings expanding and it’s feathers cutting through the air gracefully.

Mary looked back to Alex,

From her lips fell her new name.

”Jay.” 

And suddenly, Mary was gone. 

and Jay,

Jay sat in her place. 

He looked to Alex, who looked at him, who squeezed his hand tighter. 

Who smiled, and simply nodded at the name. 

“Nice. It fits you.”

Jay nodded, and smiled back.

”Better than Mary ever did.” 

Alex looked at Jay for a moment, then hummed in agreement. 

Suddenly, he undid their lined together fingers and held it out to Jay in an awaiting handshake position. 

“I’m Alexander, long for Alex. Which is short for Alexander, but I prefer Alex.” 

Jay reached out and took Alex’s hand in the shake.

”I’m Jay. Short for Jay.” 

They giggled, and a teacher turned to shush them. 

Jay smiled. 

He never felt so normal till that moment, never as Mary.

As Jay, 

he felt normal..

He felt _happy_. 

So he smiled as the sun stopped glaring and the birds sang around them gently. 


	2. Buzzcut Season

“This isn’t about your mom, Jay. It’s about you,”

Alex pointed the strawberry covered fork at him with a tilt in his eyebrow.

“Now do you want me to cut your hair for you or not?”

They sat in Jay’s warm colored kitchen, while the sun filtered through the house’s screen windows. Two smoothies sat between them with some strawberry dessert his mom had made them as she knew they were Alex’s favorite and that Jay wasn’t very picky. 

Jay tilted his head to the side, and placed his hand under his chin. 

The island table they sat at was cold under his elbow, and the designs of the wood swirled under his gaze. 

“I mean, I do want a haircut, but I don’t know how my mom would react to me just.. chopping my hair off like I want to.”

His hair curled around his face and stopped midway down his chest. 

“You mean like a buzz cut?” 

Jay snapped his eyes up to Alex’s face.

”Wait, What?”

”A buzz cut, like really close to the scalp cut.” 

Alex ran a hand through his own hair for a moment and stared down at his now empty plate.

”I had one earlier this year. Y’know, cause I was going through- a moment, and I wanted to change something about myself?” 

Jay nods, his eyes tracing Alex’s hand as it pushed back the smaller bangs on his forehead. 

A sad look buried itself deep in Alex’s eyes and Jay wanted to reach over and wipe it out with his fingertips.

He couldn’t, so he instead reached over and pulled Alex’s other hand over to him, holding it in his soft hands. 

“I want you to cut my hair.” 

That sadness drained from Alex’s eyes and a gentle happiness filled in its place. 

A smile pulled at Alex’s mouth and he giggled.

”W- why are you _so_ _serious_ about this?”

Jay could feel himself blush and he suddenly let go of Alex’s hand. 

“Shut up, Alex.”

Alex laughed gently, and pulled Jay’s hand back into his own. 

Jay stared down at their interlocked hands. He caught himself staring at a new group of small, pale lines on the boy’s already pale wrists. 

He touched them softly, hoping that Alex wouldn’t pull away. 

To his surprise, Alex didn’t. 

It only lasted a moment, but Jay swore he could feel every intent that was put into the scars. 

He hated it. 

——

Jay felt his anxieties rise the moment Alex sat him down on the edge of his tub. 

Jay trusted Alex, he really did. 

But Jay was worried about his mother finding out. Would she be mad? Would she hate him? Would she..Would she leave?

“Your mom won’t leave you because you let me cut your hair, Jay,”

Alex’s voice pushed into Jay’s mind and, for a moment, pushed aside all of his anxieties.

”If she really loves you, which I’m sure she does, she won’t leave you because of some haircut.”

Alex crouched down to be eye level with Jay. 

“Jay Merrick, your mother loves you.”

Popping back up again and stepping into the porcelain tub behind Jay, Alex reached over to the towel on the toilet seat and laid it over Jay’s shoulders. Alex then turned and plugged up the drain to the bathtub. 

Turning back to face Jay’s back, Alex ran a hand through Jay’s curls. 

“So many people love you, you know?”

Alex had leaned closer to Jay’s ear and his voice was barely above a whisper and it sent air directly into Jay’s skin and Jay could feel himself heating up. But his breath still sent a shiver down Jay’s spine.  

“Can- can you name a few?” 

Alex twisted a curl around his finger and let it pop back into place as he put the scissors close to Jay’s skin. 

“We’ll cut up to your chin, and if you like it I’ll keep going and if you don’t you can grow it back out, okay?” 

Jay nodded. 

Alex ran a hand through Jay’s curls one last time before he started talking again.

”Well, there’s your mom,” 

 _snip_ , 

“that girl named Sarah, you know her?”

”um,” 

“the one that had that rumor spread about her that she kissed another girl and that they were dating?” 

 _snip_ , 

“oh, yeah,” 

“She thinks your cute.” 

 _snip_ , 

“oh, really?” 

“Yeah.” 

 _snip_ , 

“those birds you somehow always get to follow you around at school? They probably love you a whole lot. You’re like their dad. Or king.” 

“I mean, yeah.” 

 _snip_ , 

Alex paused for a moment.

“my sister would have loved you. She liked anyone with a pulse that made me happy so, she probably would have loved you.” 

 

 _snip_ , 

“That should be good, you can look now by the way.”

Alex handed him a hand held mirror, and stepped back for a moment to let Jay look at himself. 

It looked good, but it wasn’t enough yet. He still felt the sharp electricity in his chest from that morning when he looked in the mirror and his mother called out his name. Not Jay. The other one. 

Alex had said it was called a dead name as the person who carried that name before was, in a sense, dead. 

Jay didn’t care what it was called, it made his skin crawl and he hated it. 

“That good or do you wanna cut off more?” 

Jay looked at himself for a moment. 

No. 

He looked at _her_. 

The daughter his mother gave birth to, the daughter his father had always wanted, the girl who’s father only spoke her real name with an addition of “bird” at the end when he was playful. The daughter who’s father left a week after she attempted to tell him that she was a he in a “her” body. 

He looked at the daughter he had replaced. 

And he decided. 

“Can you shave it?” 

“Buzzcut?” 

Jay placed the mirror down, there was no reason to fret over her now. 

She was dead. 

And soon Jay would be looking at Jay, himself. Not her. 

“Yeah.” 

——

It only took a couple of minutes. Just a few minutes of an electric razor buzzing around his skull, and then Alex announced that he was done.

“You can look.”

Alex handed him the mirror, which was turned around so the reflective side didn’t show him himself just yet. 

Jay held the mirror with shaking hands, and took a deep breath. 

Alex was cleaning up the strands of hair that had fallen, but he stopped and placed a hand on Jay’s knee comfortingly, a small smile on his face.

Jay spun the mirror around slowly, and took a moment to look at the reflection.

There sat a child, with blue eyes and light dark circles under their eyes. A child with a buzzcut who stared back at Jay with wide, damp eyes, and a small, wavering smile on their face. 

“It- it’s me.” 

“Of course it is. Who’d you think would be there? Dracula?”

“N-no, I just,” he sniffed and rubbed a hand against the tears that had dropped from his eyes, “it’s. Me. Jay, not, not her. It’s me, I look. Like me, and it feels so. Right.” 

He was shaking. 

The tears wouldn’t stop, but Jay didn’t care because, hey, he actually looked kind of cute when happy crying. 

He placed the mirror down and rammed into Alex, his arms wrapping around Alex’s shoulders and squeezing the air out of his lungs. 

“Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you Alex.” 

Alex hugged back, and laughed. 

“What are friends for?” 

——

When Jay had calmed down, he tried to help Alex pick up as much as possible, but Alex just kept saying that it was okay and that seeing how happy Jay was was really all the thanks he needed. 

When he was done though, Alex and Jay moved up to Jay’s bedroom. 

They laid there on Jay’s bed. 

Alex was mostly comforting Jay, who was scared for his life about his mother’s reaction now. 

“What if, what if she has the same reaction as my dad and.. leaves?”

Alex sat up and cupped Jay’s face in his hands. He leaned closer, until their noses were barely touching. 

“She won’t leave you Jay.”

Jay looked to Alex’s cheeks and stared at his freckles for a moment before continuing softly. 

“But what if she does?” 

Alex leaned back, but kept his hands on Jay’s face. A fiery gleam of determination set into his eyes as he spoke. 

“If she leaves you over you shaving your hair and becoming who you really are, then I’ll pack some things for you and I, and then we’ll get the hell out of here and go live somewhere where people will love you for being who you are because you deserve it and I will not leave you here in a home, under supervision like that, because that would destroy you. And I could never forgive myself if you were destroyed and I could have stopped it Jay.” 

Jay was at a loss for words. 

“Why?” was all he could get out. 

Alex stared at him for a moment, the fire still burning bright in his eyes, before he smiled and chuckled and backed away and let the fire burn out. 

He flicked Jay’s forehead quickly before smiling softly and laying back down.

” ’cause. Your my best friend and I love you.” 

Jay gave a quick look to Alex, attempting to ignore the blush and the warmth that had built up in him at those words. 

He looked back to the ceiling when Alex looked at him. 

Jay, in a moment of heat blooming in his chest, reached out and intertwined his fingers with Alex’s. 

It was soft, and warm, and it made Jay’s stomach do flips. 

He didn’t want a relationship with Alex, and he knew Alex didn’t want one with him. 

Something about not feeling romantic attraction to anyone, was what Alex always said. 

But it was the feeling of knowing that Alex loved him platonically that was enough to get him to speak. 

..

“Love you too, Alex.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify, Sarah is gay, but because she knows Jay as a girl before he comes out to her, she feels attraction to him.  
> Jay is only out to Alex and eventually his mom before he gets top surgery.  
> Alex, is a demiromantic pansexual, meaning, he only feels romantic attraction after a strong connection is built. He eventually realizes he’s attracted sexually and romantically to all genders, as before (around this time) he identified as bisexual while still being unknown to the aromantic spectrum, but still experiencing the effects of being demiromantic non the less.  
> Anyways ya. Sorry this took so long to update lmao.

**Author's Note:**

> As Always,  
> Comments and Kudos are much appreciated loves!~


End file.
